Intel's success with the X25-M has been quite remarkable. Not only has the drive sold more than any other SSD on the market, it's had a solid track record for reliability and compatibility as well. It's with great anticipation that we've been waiting for Intel's next generation SSD - now it's here, the Intel SSD 510. Intel continues to build on their new naming scheme, the SSD 310 is their little mSATA SSD and now the SSD 510, a mainstream SSD leveraging a SATA 6Gb/s interface and 34nm NAND to yield speeds of up to 500MB/s sequential reads and 315MB/s writes for the 250GB capacity. Intel also offers a 120GB capacity that posts speeds of 450MB/s and 210MB/s.

What is interesting will be the price. NE and Amazon don't have it listed yet. The press release gives $584 and $284 for the 250GB and 120GB SSDs, but that's in 1,000 quantities. We'll have to see what happens at retail as that will go a long way toward determining viability.

I suppose they don't feel like there's a need to. They probably have better pricing than most on NAND, so are afforded a little more flexibility in deciding when to go to 25nm. Performance wise though, there's no reason to switch. It's largely a cost/capacity issue.

Thanks for posting the numbers! How does this compare to the G2 for someone with a 3GB/s controller? If Iím reading here correctly, here are the corresponding numbers for the G2 (from storagereview.com/intel_x25-m_ssd_review):

I'm curious too. I have a little over two weeks to return the OWC drive if I decide to. Seems like the performance on ICH10R might be similar, but if the Intel drive is close to it in price, I'd rather pay the same or a bit more for something that will be more futureproof for when I move to a chipset that has SATA-3 support in a year or two.

We just wrapped up our real-world benchmarks and all a bit ago. Overall not a bad drive. Falls in-between the C300 and the Vertex 3. Pricing will be key for this drive and how well it goes in the market.